MBA Ethics
An interesting ethics-related article in Business Week has been available for a few days (Duke MBAs Fail Ethics Test) though I only just now have had a moment to read it. While the information presented is nothing new (cheating among highly competitive graduate students…really?!) the statistics are shocking nonetheless.
“Fifty-six percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students, according to a study published in September in the journal of the Academy of Management Learning & Education (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/06, ‘A Crooked Path Through B-School‘).”
Okay, sweet. And we wonder why there is a distinct lack of ethics in business… Clearly, if today’s business students are tomorrow’s business leaders, it seems as if the future will get worse, not better, as far as business ethics are concerned.
So if the picture is so bleak, what steps can be taken to move the statistics in the other direction? Two of the primary reasons are easy to spot, and are hopefully, by extension, easy to combat:
- Culture and general consensus
- Strength and consistency of ethics initiatives
I have posted on both issues in the past (most recently, see Speak Up and The Validity of Ethics Codes) and feel that the corrective mechanisms are straightforward and attainable. Rather than repeat myself regarding solutions, I would emphasize the importance of tackling ethical issues now — the longer they have to fester and grow, the greater the difficulty in getting rid of the issue in the future.
TAGS: MBA | ethics | cheating | fraud | ethics code
This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Business Ethics, CalPoly MBA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
May 8th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Well, Peter, I think you are right and that the issue is compounded by what our professors and associate deans preach to us in b-school. How many times did we hear that, to do business in China, you have to build relationships? You can even take that and apply it to global business; now, by building relationships, you fall into the “I gotta help him now if I want help later” and/or “If we partner together, we can do better than we would individually” categories. So really, the issue partly stems from not properly addressing ethical business ethics in b-school.